Moments ago, at LinuxWorld Expo being hosted in San Francisco, CA, the KDE Project was honored as the winner in the "Best Open Source Project" category. On hand to accept the Open Source Product Excellence Award on behalf of the KDE development community were KDE developers Charles Samuels and Rob Kaper, as well as yours truly. Congratulations to the KDE developers, and thanks to IDG for recognizing the excellence of the KDE desktop! Update, Thursday August 30, @1:15AM: Rob Kaper has posted pictures of the award.

Comments

> Who knows ? Not in the same way, not in the same
> time... GNU has not the monopoly of freedom...
> It does not use freedom when it tries to enslave
> Linux with the word GNU...

Oh sure, just because RMS has an opinion, suddenly the entire GNU project is guilty.

If Torvalds disagrees with RMS and calls the entire system just "Linux", RMS will sue him, remove his right to use the GPL, and threaten him to call it "GNU/Linux".
Does that sound stupid? Of course it does.
How can GNU "enslave" Linux just because of one man's opinion?

> I cannot say "I work on GNU" or "I work on
> GNU/Linux", it is false. Directly, I don't use
> any GNU programs, excepted bash, sometimes...

Then that is YOUR opinion, seperated from RMS'.
Perhaps RMS don't use KDE, but use GNOME or no desktop at all.
Perhaps he only use GNU software. If that's true, then he has every right to call his system GNU/Linux.
And you have every right to call your system whatever you want.
Get it?

> Oh sure, just because RMS has an opinion, suddenly the entire GNU project is guilty.

I did not say such a thing. And I do not think it, of course.

> And you have every right to call your system whatever you want.
> Get it?

Some ones want that anybody call it GNU/Linux. But the problem is not at first about my rights, it is about the fact that many medias now speak of KDE as a desktop of the "GNU/Linux OS", because some integrists (it's not "just one man opinion") try to impose GNU by the speech. Here is the agression, the wish to enslave the word Linux.

You wrote..."Last year I said that KDE was good but still inferior to Win 98 desktop. Now I think it is superior, even superior to Windows XP desktop in terms of functionnalities. Konqueror, Kmail/KNode, Kicker, KWord are the leaders, Explorer/IE, Outlook Express, Wordpad are behind... And KDE has much more parameters to be adapted in different ways... And it is free..."

This is of course utter nonsense. KDE is significantly slower than NT4. Konq is significantly slower than Opera and IE. NT4 is significantly easier to upgrade (I have trashed two Linux installs now because of installation dependancies (I'm a newbie). With MS, at least you get a Windows Update, and with Gnome you get Red Carpet (which is excellent also). Open Office is at least WYSIWYG unlike KOffice. Outlook express is miles ahead of KMail...

But anyway, keep up the good work guys. I'm looking forward to KDE 3.0.

> KDE is significantly slower than NT4. Konq is significantly slower than Opera and IE

On an old PC with few memory, it is significant. It is less important in many config, for example 350 Mhz, 128 Mo.

A Windows upgrade is esier than a Linux upgrade, yes, but I spoke about the desktop, not the distros upfates.

And, sorry I was a long time a user of Outlook Express and Kmail/Knode is better. Some examples : automatic wrap while typing text, the hierarchy in the mail messsages, a non-proprietary file format, marks for answered mails, the colors in the >, > >... sentences, better tooolbar management and so...

This is wonderful. But i hope the following features would be implemented.

- WINE support
Well, wouldn't it be nice to hover a .exe made for windows icon in konqi and right click it, select "Windows application" and it would open in WINE from that day onwards in Konqi, KMenu and Kicker and ofcourse, the desktop!

- Better GNOME and Motif support
There is a lot of GTK and Motif apps around. I don't use GNOME, so possibly KDE can apply themes on GTK and Motif (on user demand). This is because my Netscape window (not the title bar :) look different than my GIMP window which looks different from the rest of the desktop.

- Use Gecko in Konqueror.
Yes i know there is KMozilla, but i want to use Gecko in my fave file manager. So Konqi team should put an option for users to choice between Gecko and KHTML. At least Konqi users don't have to suffer from KHTML setbacks.

Best of luck to you guys. Wish you all developers good health and God bless!

Just define new application shortcut (.desktop file) which executes wine, than (if not defined) define mime type for .exe files and than let newly created application for wine (you may call it Windows Application.desctop) to be default application for the .exe mimetype.
That's all you need to make konqui to open .exe with wind :) (ofcorse the distro could do it for your self)

Also about the KDE support for wine, I must tell ya that wine supports kde :) because the windows icons of apps appear correctly in kicker, even apps that use systray icons appear in kicker system tray :)

About the shortcuts in KDE start menu you can simly create .desctop file and place it in your users home or global KDE menu dir. The shortcut command line should be comething like:
wine fullpath_of_windows_app
e.g.
wine /mnt/win_C/Windows/notepad.exe

- WINE support
Well, wouldn't it be nice to hover a .exe made for windows icon in konqi and right click it, select "Windows application" and it would open in WINE from that day onwards in Konqi, KMenu and Kicker and ofcourse, the desktop!

Well I have it in 2.2. RMB on a .exe shows a "Wine" entry
that runs the app through wine

... just where are we going to keep that lovely shiny piece of glass? Can we take turns at keeping it perched atop our monitors? Let's see, if everyone gets to hold it for a day, that will take at least how many decades to get around everyone???

Or KEmacs, rewritten from scratch in a real programming language (and least one with types :-)), with all the features (especially indenting/completion) and binary modules (no guys, elc is just bytecode).
Where's a project page ? I am willing to join !

Yes, I had a look at these, but
1) it does not use an OO tk
2) it was just about binding Xemacs to Gtk while keeping the lisp monolith
So a KDE Emacs rewritten from scratch (with the actual KDE Text component) could be a real winner. If I had the time, I would love to start this project myself but all I can offer yet is participation if such a thing actually begins...

That's an interesting suggestion. Personally I don't find the lisp source code to be such a bad thing.. You've gotta admit lisp is a cool language! .. and, I believe it's what's made emacs so customizable and extendable.

This is not to say things couldn't be "better". Certainly your "monolith" argument is *right* on the money. If "they" (I hate it when people use that word!) could decouple the interface (I'm visualizing a generic lisp frontend to various gui toolkits and/or curses, sure, easier said than done), the elisp interpreter, the, uh, doctor, and all the other kitchen sink bits, it would rock. And we'd get several nice programs/libraries for the price of one.

(as I understand it the reason it wasn't originally built this way was the tight memory/disk space requirements 20 years ago .. too bad emacs is still a pig today.)

I don't know how far the xemacs team is going with this kindof thing; personally, if they can redo the customization buffers so they behave like one single other interface on earth, I'll be impressed.

While I'm dreaming, I wish the fsf would finally run info2html on their helpfiles and forget they ever invented the 'info' format. Sometimes oldschool is nice, and sometimes it's just painful..

The amazing thing about emacs is how it's still better than anyting else :-)

just f.y.i. (i'm not trying to suggest that anyone in particular was ignorant of this fact) but lisp is a very efficient language. most untyped langages are interpereted scripting languages like perl and ruby. recursion also has a bad name in performance, since other languages' compilers do not optimize for tail-recursion (this is one big reason why 'compilers' that turn new languages into C or JVM bytecode are never that good.) lisp and its compiler are very efficient. a well written lisp program will run as fast and sometimes faster than an equivalent C program.

the only problem that lisp has is its lack of familiarity to programmers. but there's a very good reason RMS chose lisp for emacs: functional programming is awesome for text manipulation. ruby's strong and elegant fp implementation is a very big part of its sudden popularity.

i would suggest keeping as much of the lisp code as possible (total rewrites are almost always a recipe for endless project delays, look at what happened to netscape 5.0) and refactor the display code to be independant of the backend and scripting implementation.

there are a lot of libraries out there for making C/C++ get along well with lisp. if this project happens, i'd suggest a restructure & reimplementation of the display, rather than a complete rewrite.

p.s. a complete rewrite would almost certainly break compatibility with at least some of the enormous plethora of plugins out there.

gvim is nice and all, especially if you have a PDP-11 keyboard. If any editor needs to get a real hard look at for a native KDE port, it's jEdit.

Proper syntax high-lighting that's actually configurable. Ability to install plug-ins on the fly to handle all kinds of stuff. Gobs of features to boot.

Only down side is the memory usage due to running under the Java VM. The reason I'm mentioning all this isn't so much to plug jEdit, but to encourage those folks working on editors for KDE to give the UI on this thing a really hard look.

Well deserved recognition for the great work you have all done on KDE. I am new to KDE (used to use gnome) and i was mortified when i first installed it to find a well integrated desktop environment. Konqueror and KMail are fantastic apps and fast unlike Mozilla. What is really cool is that at work :< i use win2000 which looks outdated compared to KDE. There is no going back, the future is bright and it's KDE.

I really like KDE and the main reason why I cannot use it more is the lack of support for S/MIME email and good IMAP support. I know Netscape 4 does it but I have always found that rather inferior to the smooth interface and comparatively good functions of Outlook Express.

Does anyone know if S/MIME is going to be more widely supported? I believe Mozilla are going to do something but do not think they have got very far. Unfortunately PGP is not an option because that is not what is used by all the people I have to correspond with.

Look forward to the days when I can justify working all day on a Linux machine with a KDE Desktop.

OK, anybody don't always may use some programs, because he finds a lack for his personnal usage. But he knows it will come, he tries new versions, he prepares himself to use it. And then the function comes, he is ready... And when he uses the program regularly, he finds some little annoyances, he still does not retrieve a good comfort. And then improving continues, annoyances disappear and some little great things come...

Today what I need about Kmail or KNode ? Nothing, it is perfect for my usage. About Konqueror, still some annoyances, they decrease while great things continue... About KWord, first usage, still some difficulties, already some goodies... KSpread, no, still not ready for me, it will come with next version, and so...

And thank you Aaron for the KC KDE, it is precious to have a good visibility...

KDE _is_ fantastic; but Mozilla is doing some real progress right now; I used yeterday to browse the web with Mozilla 0.9.4 pre "Nightly" 010909-05/Gecko 010909 compiled for i686 Linux; in my opinion it´s the by far best "non IE" browser yet, and now it's _fast_, very fast, too. And stable :-) Whatch out for the final Mozilla 0.9.4(not to mention the upcoming 1.0):) could be that the code now is so functional; that the team have started doing some real optimizations ? Anyway; as far as webbrowsing is concerned, in my opinion; even KDE would, from now on, benefit by incorparating gecko as default html renderer :-)

Yes, KDE bits win9.x/win2000 a lot where it comes to look & feel, but don't forget about XP.. in general it's a rip of Mac but you must agree it looks cool...

I've created few themes for KDE (when kde.themes.org will allow to upload new themes again??? grr) and what I've noticed was lack of possibility to control kicker layout via ktheme/kstyle manager. In KDE 2.1, you could at least set the background image, now even this is not possible anymore. :/

Kicker is very important part of KDE, after all most of us look at it all the time, so it should be possible to control its look via new "Kicker styles/themes" like you can do for whole KDE now.

Kicker should have independed style/theme support. Imagine you want to have kicker menu in blue while the rest of the KDE menus are red...
Don't getting the idea? Look at some M$ XP screenshots and you will know what I mean...

I think that it would be best if we could select different themes for each individual application. Who wants a wordprocessor that looks like a CD-player or a CD-player that looks like a CAD program? In a world where all windows do not look the same you can find the right window much faster... but it might look a bit ugly - maybe it's enough to have different colour-settings for different apps, but always the same theme...

> it's enough to have different colour-settings for different apps, but always the same theme...

It already exists on many programs : you only have to change the background colour. So Konsole, Kmail, KNode, KEdit, Kate, Quanta Plus and some others have different colours.
Also, some programs, like KCalc have some nice coloured parameters... Yo, such things are rare in MS Windows, KDE has a very good look, also with nice readable icons and the lovely favicons of Konqueror...

As it is said elsewhere, I think that the first look & feel lack is now a blank or coloured cursor...

KCalc is also a nice example of a program that gets screwed up by many new, oh so beautiful styles/themes. Using Aqua-ish button style wastes an enormous amount of desktop space when you have 20-30 "small" buttons!

Maybe we should introduce the concept of thin-edge buttons to stop thick-edge-themes from wasting space in specific situations? It's wonderful to have large, nice OK / Cancel buttons, but the 20-30 calculator buttons should really be kept just big enough to do their job. But they still have to look good and fit in with the rest, so it's really the theme/style's job to provide these "cheap buttons".

Uhm, sorry but your comment's totally wrong. If you've done any checking you'd see that KCalc uses the same sized buttons no matter if your using old styles like the default or new styles like Liquid. Try it and see for yourself. I honestly don't know why people make such comments when it's visibly incorrect...

It uses the same amount of space on the desktop, but it loses more space from the buttons. Either way it's kinda bad. I wouldn't mind if KCalc used rows of rounded buttons with squarer sides, instead of them all being the bulgy things.

I congratulate the creators of KDE 2.2 as a programmer I can relate to the enormeous effort you have put into the system. I hope it is great fun for you.

As a regular user of KDE 2.2, I have noticed the following which needs to be adressed in the style/theming department of KDE3.X.

1) Kicker's menus, toolbar, applet backgrounds, systray and extensions need a unified style engine model like the rest of the KDE desktop. It needs to allow proper plugins and backgrounds. Right now the image theming of kicker is very bad because of the default border color schemes (try setting any non white-to-white gradient picture as the background and be scared by the pure ugliness of the new look). And the menu's aren't themable at all (at least to a GUI user).

2) The entire control of the look and feel is messy and all over the place. They should be split into Look and Feel. The styling of widgets, windows, fonts, menus, backgrounds and possible kicker should be in one submenu by themselves. In fact the Control Panel could do with a clean up and maybe some kind of user sophistication setting so that simple users like my mother, don't get thrown thousand terms in the face, which they don't need to see at all. Gnome's UI studies shows this clearly and it applies here as well.

3) Kicker from a UI point of view is a little messy. The combination of grips (on the different parts of the GUI), insets on both the systray, clock and taskbar create a lot of visual noise, look to the new Mac OS X bar and the WinXP one as well to see how this is done best, less is more.

On another note:
If I understand correctly Actions, such as Save, Copy, Paste and so on, are signals send to applications in KDE. If that is so, then it could also be possible that the accelerator keys for these action are per-user configured from a KControl Module, so that all supporting applications suddenly are able to share and respect each users wishes for keyboard accelerators. Would that be possible?

All entries in the KMenu of Kicker should be editable by drag and drop just like in Windows (i.e. all entries are just files). It boggles my mind how this major usuability feature could be missed. It should however be User and Group respecting, so that people like the city of Largo, could install programs onto a central location and if the file is in the right place, the next time a user logs on or the menu cache updates the program appears on their menu...

These things will be entered into bugs.kde.org as wishlist items soon, and I might even find the time to code some stuff myself.

I understand that good things may be more good, but here, I don't understand :

> 3) Kicker from a UI point of view is a little messy. The combination of grips (on the different parts of the GUI), insets on both the systray, clock and taskbar create a lot of visual noise,

?? You manage the systray and taskbar as you want. Did you tried the launch bar and task bar applets ? They are very fine.

But, yes, the clock may have more parameter (I think the LED style is not the most readable). Also there are some bugs to memorize applets when Kicker is vertical (+ clock too small)).

> All entries in the KMenu of Kicker should be editable by drag and drop just like in Windows

Yes, here it is an advantage of Windows, the menu management is heavy, and also we have no menu in the right click, so it is not possible to manage files in, the K Menu (but how many Windows users do it ?).

I hope you will code, but, please, carefully, without adding some dysfunction ;-)...

>Yes, here it is an advantage of Windows, the menu management is heavy, and also we have no menu in the right click, so it is not possible to manage files in, the K Menu (but how many Windows users do it ?).

Most Windows users I know that manage the system them self.
The whole Desktop needs to use Drag'n Drop consequent if users are to rely on it and use it.

It should be always possible to turn off such drag'n'drop. I often happens to me to drag some incons out of kicker. It is also much harder to manage other people desktops if they can screw their desktop with a one click !

On the matter of the taskbar and systray (well mostly the taskbar) the size and look of the grips are a tad too big, and the border within the taskbar I think needs to configurable (so that I could make it go away like I want it to).

On the matter of the drag'n'drop management of the K Menu entries (or any other entries) I know many Windows user, who expect this functionality (I had forgotten about the right click menus, but they can't be too hard to add).

And if I code I most likely will start with something small, but then again I might not. And I always code carefully I have been doing programming (Java and C++) work professionally five years now.

> On the matter of the taskbar and systray (well mostly the taskbar) the size and look of the grips are a tad too big,

Perhaps, it is not obvious for me.

> and the border within the taskbar I think needs to configurable (so that I could make it go away like I want it to).

Here I prefer the KDE way (with position left, top...), it offers the same abilities than in Windows and it is less dangerous. I have seen too many persons on Windows changing the place of the bar by an error of mouse moving and unable to put it on the usual place.

> On the matter of the drag'n'drop management of the K Menu entries (or any other entries) I know many Windows user, who expect this functionality

Yes.

> (I had forgotten about the right click menus, but they can't be too hard to add)

The right menu is important, and a "Move" function may be added (as in kicker) to change the place of the program in the menus. It would be better that the moving by direct mouse drag in Windows (which may be done by error).

I think that on Windows it is too easy to change the menu configuration by a bad mouse moving, I hope that such errors would be less easy on KDE.

> then it could also be possible that the
> accelerator keys for these action are per-user
> configured from a KControl Module, so that all
> supporting applications suddenly are able to
> share and respect each users wishes for
> keyboard accelerators. Would that be possible?

kcontrol -> look 'n feel -> key bindings -> application shortcuts tab

as for the style stuf, well, Qt3 introduces a new style engine and this change seems to be bringing about larger changes to KDE's theming capabilities. will be interesting to see what KDE3 holds in the look dpt.